Scenes from the Middle East—The Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project

Two years ago, two students at Yale Law School started a student organization with the goal of helping the close to 5 million Iraqi civilians who have been displaced since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Today the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project has expanded to seven additional U.S. law schools and has helped establish the first clinical legal education program in Jordan.

“We have seen the process through the refugees’ eyes—we have a sense of what’s wrong with the process and what kind of procedural changes can be made to significantly impact refugees’ lives,” says Michael Breen ’11, who heads up IRAP’s policy advocacy.

IRAP is a Law School seminar associated with the Schell Center and a student organization. Student-founded, student-led, and student-driven, the organization has a deceptively simple-sounding mission statement: to help those forced from their homes by the Iraqi War. IRAP represents Iraqi refugees seeking resettlement in the United States and Europe, provides direct assistance to Iraqis struggling to make a new home in the United States, and engages political leaders, government agencies, and international organizations on behalf of displaced Iraqis.